As someone said in this thread, independent gaming is the future, especially on PC. I see the mainstream gaming industry getting more and more casual, more and more bloated, while the small dev houses using things like the free released UE3 make games the niche gamers love to play and pay for.

Yes, independent developers will likely take up the banner. And also arguably it will be the ones from the former communist nations of Eastern Europe, where the home computer has been the dominant (and in most cases the only) gaming platform for 30 years. There is a strong home computer culture there that hopefully will resist the encroachment of the gaming consoles.

I wonder what our chances are for a North American collectors' edition, when it's finally released here later this winter. Such excellent loot for the other territories. If not for Rhialto's wonderful fan-based coin project, we wouldn't have had anything special for Clear Sky at all.

After all the hullabaloo over the invasive and ridiculous DRM in a previous 2K product, Bioshock, it's saddening that PC gamers are seemingly willing to take it lying down this time around. Why buy this game and support this asinine arrangement where you relinquish ownership control, of something that you paid for, to a corporation.

Leeching it now. This will be the first DX11 anything that I've run on my 5870. Let's see if it even runs, heh.

Update:Looks absolutely gorgeous, as I guess could be expected. The materiality of the stone buildings and cobblestones are the best I've seen. It ran a bit jerky. I left everything at default except for the resolution and ran it in full screen mode. Just for fun here are my results. As you can see with the exception of my videocard my hardware is not very cutting-edge at all.

I received a coupon voucher for this game in my ATI 5870 box, for download and installation via Steam. I think that ATI is including vouchers for this game with most of their 58XX series cards. Let's hope that it doesn't turn into a fiasco like the previous ATI Half-Life 2/Steam program did. Looking forward to seeing DX11 in action.

It's Wardell's right to boycott UPS for whatever reason he wants, and free speech is critical to democracy. But it's just irresponsibly poor leadership for a boss to drag an entire company, with all its employees, forcibly down the path as well. Wardell shouldn't have politicized the issue beyond the personal level and involved Stardock. I feel for Stardock's employees, for having to endure this drama, the inevitable subsequent consumer backlash, and for having to work for a leader like Wardell.

What a blatent and shallow attempt at PR. Anyone who has actually played this game in the last month or so should be able to see right though it. There's a reason Funcom initiated a "re-evaluation" campaign instead of a fully open trial available for everyone.

After beginning my own "re-evaluation" I realized there's been some new lipstick applied to the same old pig and that's about it. Just save yourself the total waste of a 30GB installation.

1.5.10 Changelog:This patch is backward compatible with all the patches between version 1.5.04 to version 1.5.09. This means you would be able to play all of your saved games in Stalker Clear Sky patch 1.5.10 as well.

Just finished a playthrough with a Malkavian using version 6.2, and it was an amazing experience. I have to agree with Prez, and this is simply one of the most detailed, polished, and immersive games I've ever played now. Thanks, wesp.

Hope we'll see Crimewave too. These Access titles were amazing for their time, with full motion video and also digital sound support without a soundcard. I forget what it was called, maybe "RealSound," but it allowed for digital voice and music straight to the PC speaker. I remember playing Martian Memorandum and just being stunned by the witness interviews with full video and real human voices. Makes 1991 seem like a really long time ago.